POSTSCRIPTS TO HISTORY

AMERICAN HERITAGE SOCIETY TOURS

Because of the American Heritage Society tours, which began this year, we are now happily receiving a whole new class of mail, and of a very rare and old-fashioned variety: thank-you letters. Our travellers clearly enjoyed what one, a teacher, called her “fantastic week of history.” It left her “a bit overwhelmed and saturated but also impressed and satisfied.” A rarebook dealer who joined in the same adventure writes that “From the Hudson to the Mohawk, Sunnyside to Fort Ontario, and the WaldorfAstoria to Le Moyne Manor, the New York tour last week was continuous pleasure to me.” Clearly, one of the main joys for our travellers was “getting behind the curtain”—avoiding the crowds, seeing things quietly, getting into interesting private homes, and being received as guests by curators, owners, even governors, all of them custodians in one way or another of the visible past. This month our second round of tours is underway in various parts of the country.

OF ARMS AND MEN

After reading the article on Ouster’s Last Stand (“Echoes of the Little Bighorn”) in our June issue, Colonel Alfred B. Johnson, of Alexandria, Virginia, questioned two points made by the author, David Humphreys Miller. The colonel said that, contrary to a footnote in the story of Joseph White Cow Bull, the Indians could not have captured repeating rifles during the battle, because the troopers were armed only with singleshot, breech-loading arms. He also expressed doubt about a footnote in the story of Dewey Beard that said thirty-one soldiers were killed during the massacre at Wounded Knee.

The following is Mr. Miller’s reply:
It is true that issue weapons of the 71 h Cavalry, as noted in an ordnance inventory dated March 31, 1876, on deposit with the National Archives, were the Springfield .45 carbine and the Colt .45 revolver. Also noted were two Springfield .50 carbines issued to F Company, a part of Custer’s immediate command; four Sharps .50 carbines issued to A Company and five to G Company, both under Reno’s command; and five Sharps .50 carbines issued to B Company, under Captain McDougall, which guarded the pack train.

Although none but regulation arms were mentioned in later testimony regarding the battle at the Reno court of inquiry, where the orthodoxy of the weapons was apparently taken for granted by the military, it is possible, if not probable, that officers of the 7th followed Custer’s own preference for unorthodox firearms. It is documented that he carried a Remington sporting rifle, octagonal barrel; two Bulldog, self-cocking, white-handled English pistols; a hunting knife in a beaded fringed scabbard, and a canvas cartridge belt. Mark Kellogg, accompanying the expedition as a newspaper reporter, carried a Spencer carbine, a repeating weapon; and the “Ankara Narrative” indicates that Custer’s Indian scouts (at least the Arikaras) were armed with Colt’s single-action army revolvers, and Spencer carbines had been substituted for the Springfield rifles first issued them. It is likely that the six Crow scouts, as well as other mixedblood scouts and interpreters, were similarly armed. … That some repeating weapons were carried by members of the expedition is substantiated by many of my Indian informants. …

Regarding Colonel Johnson’s statement that I have created an erroneous picture of the Wounded Knee fight, I refer him to my book Ghost Dance (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1959), in which my reconstruction of the massacre at Wounded Knee is based on the testimony of twentyone Indian survivors of the engagement in addition to that of Dewey Beard. On page 233 it states: “Yellow Bird and a few others who had guns put up a brief running fight.” On the following page it states: “Within minutes all active resistance on the part of the I ndians was over. Yet the troopers kept firing. Twenty-nine soldiers were killed outright in their own deadly crossfire. About the same number were wounded—two of them mortally.” And on page 235: “Only one soldier was actually killed at Wounded Knee by an Indian. Captain George D. Wallace, commander of K Troop and a veteran of Little Big Horn, was struck down by a warrior brandishing a stone-headed war club. His skull crushed, Wallace was found dead near the council circle with four stray bullets in his body.” As an officer, Wallace was not included in the death list of thirty-one troopers. Maps and description in the book show how the troops were disposed on three sides of the council area with additional troops dismounted as sentries completely surrounding it. Lack of discipline displayed by the troopers, by the way, so dismayed a young lieutenant in the campaign that he later instituted a new disciplinary code that was to last in the armed services for many years. The lieutenant’s name was John J. “Blackjack” Pershing.

A NEW LOOK

The interpretation of history, we are all aware, is ever changing. Wilbur R. Jacobs, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, now questions whether it is not the time to re-evaluate our ideas about the American West. Writing for the American Historical Association Newsletter of November, 1970, in an article entitled “Frontiersmen, Fur Traders, and Other Varmints, an Ecological Appraisal of the Frontier in American History,” Professor Jacobs says:

Do historians have an obligation to help counteract harmful social attitudes about the environment that run contrary to the best interests of the nation at large? It is a question that has plagued the consciences of some of our best writers, including Francis Parkman and Frederick Jackson Turner. Certainly we historians have no responsibility for what has happened in the past, but we do have access to historic records and knowledge of what earlier generations did or failed to do. The public and students can expect, therefore, that we will make available the fruits of our investigations in a form undistorted by patriotism, prejudice, sentiment, ignorance, or lopsided research. But such a presentation of the American past is, in certain areas of history, not always the rule. This criticism can be applied particularly to specific subjects in “frontier” or “westward movement” history.

Historians of the American frontier, for instance, have failed to impress their readers with the utterly destructive impact that the fur trade had upon the North American continent and the American Indian. There are no investigations of the role the fur men had in killing off certain types of wildlife, which in turn had a permanent effect upon the land and upon native and white societies. The traders and their followers, the fur trading companies, are usually depicted as positive benefactors in the development of American civilization as it moved westward from the Appalachians to the Pacific Coast. Indeed, the story of the fur trade is almost always (and perhaps unconsciously) told with a capitalistic bias. The historian usually expresses a businessman’s outlook in describing the development and expansion of this mercantile enterprise. If the fur trade contributed to the rapid economic growth of the country, and it unquestionably did (Walter Prescott Webb argued that it helped to develop a boom economy in the first two centuries of our history), then the implication is the fur trade was a good thing for all Americans. Free furs and skins, free land, free minerals; it was all part of the great westward trek and “The Development of American Society,” according to Frederick Jackson Turner and his followers. The selfmade man, the heroic figure, who conquered the wilderness was the free trapper, the mountain man. Because the history of trading does not naturally attract the reader’s interest, historians of the frontier have often gilded their flawed lily with a bit of spurious romanticism. The bear and bison hunter becomes the courageous tamer of the wilderness.

The real question of interpretation here is: who is the real varmint, the bear or the trapper who killed him? Aside from the fact that bears are sometimes noted for anti-social behavior, our frontier historians have not had a problem in answering such a question because their interpretations have been conditioned by a society steeped in a laissezfaire business ideology. Our view of progress—one which permeates all groups of society and leads us to accept without question the need for an expanding economy--is that progress consists in exploitation and growth, which in turn depends on commercialization and the conquest of nature. In our histories we have treated the land more as a commodity than as a resource. We have here in a nutshell the conquistador mentality that has so long dominated the writing of much American history.

OUR ENGLISH COUSIN

Some historians not only look at the past but also try their hand at glimpsing what the future holds. Such a one is the famed British historian Arnold Toynbee. The following is an interview with him conducted by a scribe of the London Sunday Times who calls himself Atticus:

Professor Arnold Toynbee, who’s currently revising his mammoth, 12-volume Study of History, must be our most controversial historian. His reflections on the prophet Muhammed caused a riot in India in 1969 (four dead; 67 injured). “I was very surprised,” said Toynbee. “I’m pro-Muslim.” His Study of History brought some loud protests from fellow historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper. He called Toynbee’s learned study a “windy soufflé” and accused him of egotism, obscurity and intellectual hanky-panky.

Toynbee, always amiable and never rude, refuses to shout back. “It takes two dogs to make a dog fight,” he says. “Some critics aim to get your blood. Others aim at the truth.” Where does Trevor-Roper fit in? “I really couldn’t say,” says Toynbee. “I met him afterwards, though and he was very polite. I can’t remember what he said.” Toynbee’s famous for seeing patterns in history and he says you can learn about the present by looking at the past. The Americans could have learned a thing or two about Vietnam by looking at the confrontation between David and Goliath. “Goliath was equipped with fantastic armaments. He would have been wiser to have taken note of what David was equipped with.” …

Toynbee, who predicted the First and Second World Wars, is often accused of being pessimistic. He once said that the future of the world in the atomic age lay in remote places with people like the Tibetans and the Eskimos. “Unfortunately after I said that, the Chinese moved into Tibet and Western culture got to the Eskimos who started eating canned food.”

He thinks our only hope lies in world government and unity by agreement. “In the past it’s always been unity by a knock on the head which always seemed to work better.” In the atomic age it’s difficult. Everyone gets knocked on the head. Toynbee is still pretty pessimistic and he sees Black Power, hippy and drug cultures as possible symptoms of the disintegration of Western civilisation.

If he’s attacked and called a windy soufflé in Britain, he’s a revered figure in Japan. A national Japanese newspaper has asked its readers for questions to put to the wise Professor and Toynbee has just received a batch of 67 containing some like these: “What are we here for?” and “What is the nature of the universe?” Toynbee found them difficult but he struggled through. “I said something like: we are conscious of the universe but we don’t understand it. …”

THE WIZARD WINS

A photograph we ran in the April issue, that of Charles P. Steinmetz and Albert Einstein (“Dos Passos: The Wizards Meet”), occasioned a letter from C. P. Yoder, of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, who began his career in electrical engineering as a laboratory assistant at General Electric in 1910. Mr. Yoder, now curator of the Pennsylvania Canal Society, recalls:
The unique personality of Steinmetz, together with his genius as a mathematician, provided much meat for the publicity department … [from which] many exaggerations and myths developed. One much-publicized story that is no myth was his strong attachment to black stogie cigars. It is indeed rare to find a picture of Steinmetz that does not include his favorite cigar. Sometime prior to 1910 General Electric issued an order prohibiting smoking in the company’s offices. When Steinmetz did not appear for several days, he was discovered working in his private laboratory at his home. When his absence was questioned, he merely remarked, “No smoking, no Steinmetz.” Obviously, the order was quickly rescinded.

We reproduce above, in the next column, one of those rare photographs.

SPOON RIVER: A CORRECTION

The editors regret that in the article by Edward Laning entitled “Spoon River Revisited,” in the June, 1971, issue, we inadvertently failed to give credit to the copyright owner of the selections by Edgar Lee Masters that were used. Two poems that were quoted, ” Anne Rutledge” and “Lambert Hutchins,” are from Spoon River Anthology, the credit for which should read: Copyright ©1914, 1915, 1916, 1942, 1944 by Ellen C. Masters. The credit for the prose passage from Edgar Lee Masters’ The Sangamon should read: Copyright ©1942, 1969 by Ellen C. Masters. We extend our humble apologies to Mrs. Masters, the poet’s widow.

THE LEGENDARY GOLDING

In recalling the adventures and the misadventures of an Army correspondent’s life in World War II (“At War with the Stars and Stripes,” April, 1971) our author, Herbert Mitgang, unintentionally omitted the role played by David Golding. Mr. Mitgang now adds this postscript:
In a remarkable group of Army journalists Golding served as a legendary managing editor for our Rome edition, which was generally considered to be the finest of the Stars and Stripes publications. A former reporter for a film daily in New York, he brought a hard-hitting Manhattan newspaper wisdom to military journalism and, with his movie experience, managed to juggle various prima donnas on the staff, most of whom wanted to cover the front line instead of sitting back in the fleshpots of Rome and Naples.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON AMTRAK

For those of us who fondly recall and relish rail travel, the new government-operated railroad network known as Amtrak leaves much to be desired. Skepticism about the quality and frequency of service appears warranted, as the National Association of Railroad Passengers News pointed out in a recent article entitied “Enthusiasts.” Herewith, from that article, are quotations from three directors chosen by the nation’s railroads to serve on the Amtrak board as the lines’ representatives:

Louis W. Menk, chairman of the Burlington Northern, speaking on NBC’S “Today Show” on February 26, 1970, said that “in my view we ought to let the intercity passenger train, the long distance passenger train, die an honorable death like we did the steamship, or the riverboats and the stagecoach and pony express.”

William H. Moore, president of the Penn Central, told a news conference in Pittsburgh on September 9, 1970, that “probably all the railroads in the country are losing money in the passenger business” and that there is “absolutely no future in this country for long-distance passenger trains.”

William J. Quinn, chairman of the Milwaukee Road, told members of the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce on November 13, 1969, that “we can no longer compete effectively for the passenger under present conditions, which are beyond our control to materially change,” and that “there is no foreseeable reversal of this march of events which has produced an exodus from trains.”

These remarks, all made before Amtrak came into existence, do not, we think, presage confidence in the system. The same NARP News quoted a member of its advisory board, Dr. Mario Pei, on the issue. Said Dr. Pei, who is professor emeritus of romance philology at Columbia University: “It is my considered judgment that the American railroad passenger system, once the finest in the world, is now on a par with underdeveloped countries, and in its death-throes. Also, that Amtrak is a snare and a delusion, designed to lull us into a false sense of security while the job of killing our passenger service is completed.”

A REBUTTAL

In “A Black Cadet at West Point” in our August issue, John F. Marszalek, Jr., claimed that a recent history of the Academy by Thomas J. Fleming failed to give a full account of the case of Johnson Whittaker, the black cadet who was investigated and court-martialled for alleged self-mutilation, among other charges. In West Point: The Men and Times of the United States Military Academy (1969), said Marszalek, Fleming “goes into some detail on the court of inquiry, but says nothing of the subsequent court-martial”; and Fleming was quoted as writing that although “the definitive truth will probably never be known,” nevertheless, “any fairminded examination of the case would find the evidence heavily against him [Whittaker].” This, Mr. Marszalek implied, is not a balanced view.

Mr. Fleming, who is a frequent contributor to this magazine, has sent us the following answer:
I did not discuss the court-martial of Cadet Whittaker in my book on West Point because, as Mr. Marszalek himself points out in his article, it was essentially a rehash of the court of inquiry. I am not at all impressed by the fact that Mr. Whittaker’s court-martial decision was reversed. This was a political necessity for the Republican administration in Washington, who held office thanks to the slim majority provided by Negro votes. The Judge Advocate General may have “riddled the prosecution’s case” —although I note Mr. Marszalek does not give us any details on this point. But the verdict was overturned on two technicalities, the lack of authority to call a court-martial and the introduction of Whittaker’s letters.

Mr. Marszalek’s article suffers from a severe lack of historical perspective. Nowhere does he tell us that Negro cadet Henry Flipper had already graduated from the Military Academy when the Whittaker case exploded. Nor does he mention James Webster Smith, another Negro cadet, who even Flipper admitted was a despicable character, who invited newspaper reporters to the Academy and told them malicious lies about his treatment. In short, there is no understanding of the glare of publicity on Negro cadets at West Point at this time, which makes the argument for Whittaker’s self-mutilation much more plausible than the argument for an attack on him, which even the most prejudiced cadet knew would rebound on the Academy and bring the reporters swarming onto the Plain again. The whole theory of a cadet attack, in the light of the details, makes no sense. If they merely wanted to scare Whittaker into leaving, why did they tie him to the bed? Why not just beat him up a little, threaten to kill him, maybe clip off a little of his hair —but why tie him up so the tactical officers were certain to find out about it, and start a hue and cry? Anyone who has read my history and seen the innumerable anecdotes I collected of cadet ingenuity in evading tactical officer surveillance and rules, would scoff at such an idea.

I think Mr. Marszalek has been carried away by sympathy for Whittaker because of his treatment at the Academy, sympathy which, as I make clear in my book, I share.

FIGURING AHEAD: THE PASSAIC IN 1902

Long before anyone ever heard of ecology, pollution was a problem. As far back as 1880 the Passaic River in northern New Jersey had lost its pristine quality. Pollution was the reason, caused chiefly by carbolic acid discharged by a paper mill and raw sewage dumped into the river by communities along its shores. As a result Newark and Jersey City had unusually high death rates from typhoid fever. Despite steps to control the worst offenders, conditions were not much better when the sardonic cartoons above appeared in the Newark Sunday Call in 1902. “How would you enjoy being a figurehead on the polluted Passaic?” the caption writer asked.”… it is to be hoped none of the craft that bears them will poke their noses further up than Newark Bay.”